It's frightening, really. The last two nights while trying to fall asleep I have been obsessively thinking about Ann Coulter. It's frightening, but not surprising, I suppose, since for the last several months I have been trying hard to ignore Ms. Coulter, who gives me the screaming creeps. But as any Freudian will tell you, repression will out. The proximate cause of my obsessive nocturnal visitations was a couple of remarks of the pundit reported this week pretty widely in the (left) alternative media. The first, to the effect that Timothy McVeigh should have bombed the New York Times building instead of a federal office building in Oklahoma, elicited general outrage & rightly so; but another remark really struck a nerve with me. It's a remark that has gone largely unremarked, if you will; but it is telling. Ann Coulter is apparently suffering from the delusion that she "speaks for the American people." She is quoted as making this claim in a piece in the right-wing rag the New York Observer. Here's a nasty little snippet, in which the Connecticut WASP is talking about NYC: ". . . 'we’re living in an insane asylum', Ms. Coulter said. She said she 'takes joy in liberal attacks. It’s like coffee. I mean, usually when I write up a column, I know what’s going to drive them crazy. I know when I’m baiting them, it’s so easy to bait them and they always bite. That is my signature style, to start with the wild, bald, McCarthyite overstatements—seemingly—and then back it up with methodical and laborious research. Taunting liberals is like having a pet that does tricks. Sit! Beg! Shake! Then they do it.' Ann Coulter is not a screeching reactionary? 'The American people don’t think so. I speak for them'."

I'd like to see the demographic data on who is buying Coulter's Slander. Somehow, I have the sense that it's not my neighbor Ed, who lives up the road & runs the General Store here in South Colton; & somehow I have the feeling that it's not the father of one of my students I met last night who, after dropping his kid off at my college, told me that he & his wife were going to "get the camper & go up to Blake Falls & do a little fishing." We had been talking about the Raquette River, on the banks of which both of us live. Does Ann Coulter, wearing a short black dress & sipping white wine in a snazzy NY bistro, speak for these guys? How long since she's been in a bass boat? Ed & my student's dad both may very well vote Republican, but Ed doesn't bat an eye when I walk into his store wearing my Ho Chi Minh t-shirt & dad didn't seem concerned to be dropping his kid off at a university, where, it's well-known, all the professors are card-carrying member of The Left. That's because Americans are at heart a tolerant people. Coulter's notion that she speaks for the American people is so ludicrous as to suggest a profound deficit in the realm of reality testing. That is to say, Ms. Coulter is a raving lunatic. Actually, Coulter gives most lunatics a bad name--most crazy people aren't vicious bitch-goddesses who call for the murder of people they don't like.

Fact is, Ann Coulter, child of privilege, born in Connecticut, who lives in New York City [to be read in the outraged voices of those cowboys in the salsa commercial], is a member of the Northeast media elite. She's just another one of the--I was going to say "clowns," but clowns are artists--one of the badly educated, solipsistic products of excessive affluence produced after the idealism of the sixties had died out. So, no, Ann, you don't speak for "real Americans." Ed & my students & their folks & my other neighbors on Mill Street, we're the real Americans. We have various & often conflicting political positions, but we get along with each other; we vote in our local elections, we go to work every day. We contribute our labor, physical & intellectual, to American society. Ann, what do you contribute? Despite your blonde good looks, it appears that you are a parasite within the body politic. You're a fucking alien, Ann. You make us real Americans sick with your lies. I had to worm a puppy the other day--man, he hated that medicine, but today he's romping around with a shiny coat & a good appetite. That puppy loves everybody, too. There were some worms in his gut that he shit out. They're dead.